


Lazy Lob and Crazy Cob

by fredbassett



Category: Primeval, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 18:15:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1357177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fredbassett/pseuds/fredbassett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An anomaly opens in a forestry commission plantation and team members start to disappear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lazy Lob and Crazy Cob

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Annariel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annariel/gifts).



Claudia stamped her feet, doing her best to keep the circulation going in her toes. Fleece-lined boots had become a must on anomaly call outs in winter, as had a good, warm waterproof coat, hat, scarves and gloves. In fact, she was certain that she rather closely resembled Nanook of the North, but was beyond caring.

It was freezing cold and she was getting really rather tired of standing around in frost-covered fields or forests, doing her best to prevent any public relations disasters of the sort usually associated with Nick Cutter on a bad day, or a good day, or any day at all. The man had the tact of a charging bull elephant and the interpersonal skills of a lowland gorilla with haemorrhoids. Only the ever-patient Stephen Hart managed to exercise any control over him at all. Although that wasn’t quite true; Stephen was simply the only team member able to control Cutter without decking him with a good right hook or surgically applying the butt of a semi-automatic pistol to the back of his neck. And much as she might privately applaud Ryan’s robust method of dealing with recalcitrant academics, she did prefer to avoid team members being laid out on her watch. It made the paperwork so much easier to deal with afterwards if there had been no fisticuffs, as Lester liked to term it.

She peeled back the top of one glove and checked her watch. “How much longer for checking the perimeter, Ryan?”

“It should be done now, Ma’am.” The captain frowned and spoke into the microphone of his radio headset. “Finn, Kermit, what’s taking so long? Report.”

It was quite clear that Ryan’s request had been greeted by a resounding silence.

His frowned deepened. “Lyle, I need a sit-rep. What the fuck’s going on?” Ryan glanced at her, muttered, “Sorry, ma’am,” listened, frowned again and said, “All right, but keep me posted.” He turned back to Claudia, a look of uncharacteristic uncertainty on his face. “Finn and Kermit have gone dark on comms, so have Cutter and Stephen. And Lyle’s thumbs are pricking. I’d rather you got in one of the vehicles and stayed there, ma’am.”

“I’m sure you would, Ryan, but that’s not going to happen.”

Before Ryan could start to argue, Claudia heard the crackle of his radio.

“He said what?” Ryan sounded slightly incredulous. “Fucking great big spiders? Since when has Finn been bothered by spiders? OK, stay on comms and let’s find out what the fuck’s going on in there….” He still looked puzzled as he told her, “Lyle says he heard a yell from Finn about spiders.” Ryan raised his voice to the rest of the team. “Blade, Ditzy, with me.” He pulled a spare radio set out of one of the vehicles. “Put this on, ma’am, and stay close to us.”

With his rifle held across his chest, Ryan made his way into the forest. It was a typical Forestry Commission conifer plantation, springy underfoot from years of fallen pine needles forming a squashy carpet that cracked beneath her boots as they crushed the layer of frost. She could see the sparkle of the anomaly about fifty metres away through one the gaps between the trees, laid out in serried rows like soldiers on parade.

The intention had been for Finn and Kermit to check a wide sweep around the anomaly with Cutter and Stephen, looking for any tracks in the frost while Lyle had gone with Abby and Connor to check for any sign of predators in a nearby field, as they’d picked up reports of an irate farmer complaining to the police about sheep rustling.

Claudia never ceased to be amazed by the change in the soldiers as soon as the game was on in an anomaly shout. They went from affable and jokey to hard-eyed and dangerous in the blink of an eye. She knew better than to cramp their style in any way and had become adept at keeping herself out of trouble in the field. It was surprising how well hiding behind a tree could work in a variety of situations.

The forest has a dense, oppressive atmosphere. The trees were massive and had a feeling of advanced age, with an undercurrent of discontent, as though they were now simply waiting to be felled, and didn’t like that prospect at all. Even the hoar frost on their branches failed to lighten the scene. Claudia heard a rustle overhead and looked up, but the canopy above her was dense and she couldn’t make out anything.

“Squirrel,” said Ditzy.

“Looked a big fucker,” Blade observed. “And blacker than usual.” To Ryan he added: “Boss, possible sighting of something weird.”

Ryan nodded, and told Lyle on the radio to be on the look out for black, over-sized squirrels as well as unaccountably missing soldiers and academics.

As they moved closer to the anomaly, Claudia found that she was holding her breath, wondering what they were going to encounter. She dug her hand deep in her pocket for the folding knife Blade had given her on one call-out when she’d refused Ryan’s offer of a gun. He’d been adamant that she shouldn’t accompany them completely unarmed, and she’d allowed herself to be persuaded. Now the solid weight of the knife in her hand was a comforting presence in the midst of a wood that now seemed a strange and threatening place.

Over the radio, she could hear Lyle reporting back his movements. The lieutenant was now to their west, on the fringes of the forest, having found nothing but some strange tracks just outside the field that looked like something had been dragged into the trees, but there had been no blood and only some marks on the ground that without either Stephen or Finn, he’d been unable to decipher.

“There’s a spot ahead where a few trees have come down,” Lyle said. “I can see the anomaly through them, so I’m not far away from you now…” Lyle’s sharp intake of breath was clearly audible over the comms link. “Fucking hell, there are some bloody great big cocoons strung up in the trees!”

A moment later, Claudia heard a sharp yell come at her over the radio and through the forest she recognised Abby’s voice.

“Ditz, take point!” Ryan ordered. “And remember to look up! Lyle mentioned spiders… Blade, you’re with Miss Brown.”

Ditzy broke into a run, not easy on the soft carpet of pine needles. This far into the forest there was no frost on the ground and Claudia could feel her boots sinking by a couple of inches with every step. It made progress hard going, especially as she was trying to follow Ryan’s instruction to look up as well. A near miss with a tree quickly put paid to that idea.

“Fucking hell!” Ahead, the normally imperturbably medic had just come to a rapid halt. String across the gaps between the tall trees was something that looked like grey, furry rope. Ditzy reached out with the barrel of his rifle and then pulled it back. Whatever it was stuck to his rifle and stretched backwards.

“It’s a web,” Ryan said, an unmistakeable note of disgust in his voice.

Claudia remembered how much he’d disliked the large spiders they’d encountered in the tube station. Their tough Special Forces captain had a pronounced dislike of anything with eight legs, no matter its size.

At her side, Blade promptly pulled a long-bladed knife out of a thigh sheath and slashed at the web. It parted under the sharp steel.

A hissing, chittering noise above her sent a shiver through Claudia’s gut. For a moment she almost thought she’d heard a voice, as cold as the wind in the trees saying, “More of them come, make good eating when hung.” And then all hell broke loose, or – more accurately – dropped from the trees amongst them.

She heard Ryan yell, “Verify your fucking target!” as a shot rang out, almost deafening in the blanketing silence of the tree cover.

Ahead of Claudia loomed an enormous spider, standing almost as tall as her, its eight hairy legs stamping on the carpet of pine needles, and what looked like an entire bank of eyes staring at her. The spider’s mouth opened and a sibilant hiss that sounded uncomfortably like the word, “Nice,” followed by the even more chilling, “Juicy!”

Ryan raised his rifle and, without hesitation, put a short burst of bullets through the beast’s bulbous body. At the same time, Blade jumped forward and swung his knife like a short sword, chopping at one of the long legs, severing it mid-way to the body. The spider toppled forward, but before it had even hit the ground, another had dropped from the trees to take its place.

Claudia fumbled in her pocket for her own knife. She pulled it out and opened the wicked-looking blade, locking it in place, but the spiders had the longer reach and were clearly attempting to subdue their prey with a strike from the massive sting hanging obscenely between their back legs.

With the knife held firmly in her gloved left hand, Claudia looked around for any other weapon. All she could see were some large stones fallen from what had one been a dry stone wall crossing the plantation. She grabbed one and hurled it at the second spider just as Ditzy’s rifle spat a muzzle-flash in the dim light and more bullets did damage to their eight-legged assailants.

From that moment on, drawing breath was hard, spiders swarmed everywhere. Claudia threw rocks from the wall, Ryan and Ditzy used bullets where they thought there was little chance of a so-called friendly fire incident, and Blade lived up to his name and used his knife to devastating effect. She could tell from the radio traffic that Lyle had discovered that the cocoons held their missing team members and, aided by Abby and Connor, was doing his best to free them from their sticky prisons.

For every spider they brought down, it seemed like two more took its place. Claudia ended up with her back to a tree, throwing what rocks she could find from the old wall, and sweeping her knife in wide arcs, doing her best to follow Blade’s lead. The tree protected her back, but with alarming rapidity, the position that had seemed to offer some degree of safety became exactly the opposite as a spider circled around her, spinning a web as it went. The grey web held her to the tree and as fast as she slashed at it with a knife, the spider ran around her again, replacing it.

Claudia opened her mouth to scream, intending to alert her companions to her predicament, when the spider toppled sideways, two of its legs swept from under it. Over the twitching body of her attacker, Claudia saw a tall man armed with a knife much longer than hers, which he was using to very good effect. He held it in both hands and plunged it down into the spider’s body. It let out an unpleasant gurgle and dark blood bubbled out of the wound.

The man struck it again for good measure and then turned his attention to Claudia, using the bloodied metal to cut through the web binding her to the tree. Claudia wondered who the hell her rescuer was and where he’d come from. He was wearing a dark green, weather-stained cloak over a tunic of a similar colour, belted at the waist. A pair of brown, loose-fitting trousers and well-worn leather boots completed an outfit that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a medieval re-enactor’s wardrobe.

He was good-looking in a rather battered way, but his hair could have done with washing. He smiled at Claudia, lightening a serious and somewhat severe expression. “My lady, you have given a good account of yourself.”

His accent was hard to place, and Claudia’s first thought was that he’d come through the same anomaly as the spiders. The man joined the fight, slashing and hacking at the spiders, while swaying quickly and easily out of range of their stings. With the stranger’s help, the tide of the skirmish started to turn. Three of the spiders broke ranks and scuttled towards the anomaly. Lyle took down one of them, but the other two escaped past him.

In the course of the next few minutes five more were killed and the remainder fled. As soon as she could, Claudia ran to the silver-grey cocoons suspended on sticky thread from the branches of the trees and started to carefully cut away the web, as Abby and Connor were doing. She recognised the grey-green Swedish army jacket that Cutter habitually wore and redoubled her efforts to get the web away from his face, hoping desperately that he was still alive. Next to her, Ditzy was doing his best to tear the cocoon from Stephen’s face, while Blade did the same for one of his teammates.

Cutter spluttered a Scottish-sounding curse and then started coughing. Claudia pulled him over onto his side into the recovery position.

“The spider’s venom will dull their senses and confuse their wits, my lady,” the stranger said. “But if they are strong, they will return to health within a day.”

“Where did you come from?” Claudia demanded. She jerked her head towards the anomaly. “Did you come through that?”

“Doesn’t sound like he’s from Norfolk,” Blade commented laconically.

Claudia was inclined to agree with him, and wasn’t surprised when the man nodded. “I follow the servants of darkness wherever they choose to go. When I heard a large colony of the spawn of Ungolient had left Mirkwood, I followed them.”

The full horror of what they had faced swept over Claudia in a cold wave. “They were… speaking. Spiders can’t talk.” She was trying to convince herself as much as anyone else.

“Forget their words,” the man told her. “Don’t let them haunt your dreams.”

“They’re all alive!” Ditzy announced.

Claudia closed her eyes in relief, and took Nick’s cold hand in hers and felt him squeeze her fingers.

A plaintiff baaa told her that even some of the unfortunate sheep had survived their run in with an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare.

She had no bloody idea at all where talking spiders and the weather-beaten stranger had come from, but for the moment, she didn’t really care.

They returned the sheep to the farmer and let it be known that the government would pay a substantial bounty on any non-native squirrels – alive or dead – that he and his sons were able to catch.

The report, when she handed it in, was heavily edited. Some stories were better left untold.


End file.
